The President’s speech was good as oratory, but the lack of understanding of what is really going on in the Middle East means that the strategy the White House seems bent on pursuing is unlikely to succeed.

The most disconcerting element in the speech was that even now, six years into the job, President Obama still doesn’t know how to avoid telegraphing weakness even as he seeks to project strength.

There is an underlying assumption shared by both religious conservatives and their progressive antagonists (they just differ on what to do about it): that modernity means a decline of religion and its concomitant morality. That’s not exactly right, however.

When it comes to Israel, The Intercept’s coverage crosses the line from opinion journalism to a crude and vile form of propaganda.

The brutality of the Islamic State may have opened a window for regime change in Damascus.

Whenever the U.S. Government has a choice between doing nothing and sending in the cavalry to sort out a non-vital national security contingency, it is a sure sign of an antecedent failure of imagination and planning.

The rising numbers of new arrivals are putting a serious strain on Europe’s migration outposts and heating up the immigration debate across the EU.

In the topsy-turvy universe of Middle East politics, nothing succeeds like failure on the battlefield and nothing fails like military success. So who won the Gaza war?

America’s choices in Ukraine, as in the Middle East, are few and they are ugly. But a choice needs to be made. The half-hearted dithering that has passed for policy up until now from the West will no longer suffice.

If you want to get businesses to support your cause, appeal to their interests rather than moral principles.